A fire chief who was among the first to assist Princess Diana after her tragic Paris car accident has talked for the first time about how she turned to him and said, “Oh my God, what’s happened?”

Sergeant Xavier Gourelon, one of the first rescuers to arrive to the Alma tunnel on August 31, 1997, claimed he remained with her and held her hand in an effort to calm her down.

He informed the Daily Mail that he suspected something terrible had occurred since a complete medical team had already been sent to the site of the horrific accident.

“She spoke in English and said, ‘Oh my God, what’s happened?’ I could understand that, so I tried to calm her. I held her hand,” said Gourmelon, who provided police testimony but had never before talked to the press.

Mr Gourmelon told the Daily Mail that when he arrived, he saw Mr Rees-Jones, who looked “very agitated” and in need of medical attention.

The sergeant also saw a doctor crouching in the Mercedes wreckage with another victim, who turned out to be Diana, who was “moving and talking.”

Off-duty doctor Frederic Mailliez, who was travelling the other way and stopped when he spotted the Meredes disaster, said Diana was “severely injured” but alive.

“I noticed some smoke in the tunnel and I drove slower and slower and then I saw [the Mercedes],” Frederic Mailliez told the Mail.

“Inside the Mercedes two [victims] were already apparently dead and two were severely injured but still alive.”

He then rushed to his vehicle to get whatever medical supplies he had and dialed emergency services.

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“Then I went back inside the Mercedes and tried to give assistance to the young woman,” he added.

“She was sitting on the floor in the back….she was a most beautiful woman and she didn’t have any [serious] injuries to her face. she was almost unconscious and was having difficulty breathing,” he said. “She looked fine for the first minutes,” he recalled. .”

“So I began to speak English to her, saying that I was a doctor and that the ambulance was on its way and everything is going to be all right,” he said.

He went on to say that “apart from her shoulder” he couldn’t find anything wrong with William and Harry’s mother.

Gourmelon’s crew extracted Diana’s then-boyfriend Dodi from the debris and attempted to revive him.

He began by assisting Diana, who was “sitting on the floor in the back” of the Mercedes.

Philippe Boyer, a firefighter buddy, equipped her with a cervical collar and a new breathing mask. Boyer then wrapped Diana with a silver isothermal blanket. Her respiration was normal, and her pulse was ‘fine and quite strong.’ Things were looking up.

Then a captain on the site informed him that the accident victim was one of the world’s most renowned ladies.

“He tells me who she is and then, yes, I recognise her, but in the moment I didn’t,” he said.

Diana would eventually die in hospital from severe internal injuries, despite surgery.

The revelation that it was Diana was so startling that the hospital’s duty chaplain, Father Yves-Marie Clochard-Bossuet, twice hung up the phone when requested to visit, thinking it was a hoax.

The notorious car crash occurred minutes after Diana, Dodi, Trevor Rees-Jones, and Henri Paul left the Ritz in Paris just after midnight.

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